Electronic controllers are often utilized to control various aspects of physical systems. Such controllers receive information from the physical system, process the information and generate one or more control signals to control certain aspects of the operation of the physical system. Although such controllers allow a great deal of information to be processed in a brief period of time, certain physical systems, by virtue of their complexity and speed of operation, impose significant demands on such controllers to generate accurate control signals in response to rapidly changing conditions.
For instance, related U.S. Pat. No. 5,353,768, noted above, and entitled "A Fuel Control System with Compensation for Intake Valve and Engine Coolant Temperature Warm-Up Rates" discloses a fuel controller which improves engine performance, particularly during warm-up, by controlling the amount of fuel delivered to the engine in a manner that is consistent with the vaporization rate of fuel during engine warm-up. In such a system, particularly during transient operation, it is desirable to alter the fuel delivery rate upon firing of each cylinder within the engine in order to provide optimal engine response. Such a manner of control requires the controller to perform a significant number of calculations in a brief period of time in order to accurately control the delivery of fuel to the engine. Because of the large number of computational steps which the controller must perform to adequately compensate for the rapidly changing vaporization rate of fuel, in addition to controlling other aspects of engine operation, the full computation is not performed before the firing of each cylinder. Consequently, although such a manner of control provides for improved engine response, the response generated by the controller may not always be based upon contemporaneous engine conditions. Accordingly, there exists a need for an electronic controller which can accurately alter the operation of a physical system, such as an internal combustion engine, in response to rapidly changing external conditions by generating control signals in response to contemporaneous system conditions, which may require time consuming computationally intensive operations within the controller.